/m/lenny_dykstra

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I defer to Roger Angell in almost everything baseball-related, but 28 years later I still don't understand why he rooted for the Mets, with their myriad personality problems, over the Red Sox in the 1986 World Series.

it's been pretty conclusively established that all stockpicking services are frauds, copying another frauds picks doesn't make your picks any less legitimate.

Here at my work they had a bunch of finance interns this summer, and one of the side activities the company had organized for them was a contest on futures trading. There were maybe 7 teams, each with an allotment of fake money they were to use to "buy" and "sell" futures contracts at the going market rate.

One team had a strategy of making no trades and sitting on the money. They finished in second place.

I'm not going to equate finance interns with experienced investors. But finance interns are fine examples of amateurs, and they demonstrated what happens when you give your money to amateurs. The investment world is FULL of amateurs.

1 - i'm assuming he copied suttmeier's basic strategy. given how much lenny has lied about nearly everything else, it's not a stretch to assume he took that from suttmeier.

the problem is that lenny's 'strategy' doubles down in a market that isn't completely liquid. so you start off buying 10 options, doubling down for 20 more, then 40 more, etc. you soon come to a point where you can't game the market, because you *are* the market.

so lenny could have 90 straight 'wins' - and the 1 loss would eat up all those wins and then some. what lenny did with his one loser was change things, so he 'sold' them earlier, then said something about hypotheticals and that his trades weren't done with real money, he was just selling a service - i don't even remember what other excuses he came up with. the "paper trading" one came to light when it was shown that he couldn't have placed the trades at the price he said, because only (let's say) 10 options traded at that price, and he was buying 100 or something similar.

there are definite people and systems that can work. problem is, if they have any success over a period of time, lots more money flows into them (either as a fund, or in this case, people trading the same stocks as the system). that then alters how the market would behave, and causes worse results in the once-successful system.

but most black-box 'systems' are backfitted, only work in a limited timeframe, etc. and should NOT be trusted. for most of those people, it's a case of 'if it was so great, why wouldn't you use it for yourself?' and for the rest, they can sell it to one of the big boys, and rake in a % of the returns.

I defer to Roger Angell in almost everything baseball-related, but 28 years later I still don't understand why he rooted for the Mets, with their myriad personality problems, over the Red Sox in the 1986 World Series.

I defer to Roger Angell in almost everything baseball-related, but 28 years later I still don't understand why he rooted for the Mets, with their myriad personality problems, over the Red Sox in the 1986 World Series.

so lenny could have 90 straight 'wins' - and the 1 loss would eat up all those wins and then some.

One of the sad lessons I learned as a day trader back in the late '90s. I could go several days in a row making $$, hitting all my picks, and one f*!#ing bad trade could wipe out all my profits and I'm back at the starting line again. "Winning %" really doesn't mean all that much in the trading game. Very frustrating.

Ironically, after I decided to stop throwing my $$ away on the markets, I briefly went to work for a small R&D company that had listed as one of their investors...Lenny Dykstra! Guess that should have told me I wouldn't last long there...

winning % is hugely important if you're trying to sell a system - 80% winners! - but it isn't the measuring stick for trading. it's how much money with how much risk you took to make that money. i've found that you can have a lower winning % with your winners MUCH larger than losers, or a higher winning % with your winners not much less than losers, but you can't have huge losses (relative to account size) and survive.

No, it was a medical research company trying to build a better mousetrap, er, dialysis machine. And Lenny was one of the investors.

One of the weirdest things that I've ever experienced in my work life - I had been there several months and was working as part of the budget committee for the next fiscal year and our meetings with Sr. Mgmt. showed all kinds of developments in the works. I had access to all sorts of Personnel info and saw in the line item details that the upcoming year's budget included promotions and significant salary increases for me and a couple of others on the Accounting/Finance team per the CFO.

Then came Black Friday. A new company bought the place out, brought in their own people and pink slipped the CFO, VP of Finance, Financial Controller and pretty much our entire dept. So much for that budget I saw!

30 - i wouldn't say best, but damn, he was good. glad that there's unreleased performances of his floating around...but i didn't care for los enchiladas (the movie which hasn't seen the light of day).

oh, it's mitch hedberg for those who don't know the line.

31 - that's brutal. esp. since you could see your "future" wages and increased responsibilities...i didn't know lenny was a legit investor in anything other than the car washes (and i guess the magazine, though much of that was on the wimpy model of paying tomorrow for something today).